The embodiments described herein relate generally to collaborative development activities and, more particularly, to creating an online isolated workspace that duplicates all or at least part of an original workspace.
Rapid and clear exchange of ideas is of paramount importance when a design team is working on a project. However, unless members of a design team are working intimately and in close proximity, the exchange of ideas is often ineffective and incomplete. For example, a design team may be spread across various departments within an organization, or in different geographic locations, so that team members cannot engage in a spontaneous dialogue. Moreover, the members of a design team are increasingly spread across different companies, in different industries, and even different countries. When a design team involves such a diversity of members, an efficient and spontaneous exchange of ideas is often non-existent.
In existing systems, ideas that underlie designs are often shared by a team in an anachronistic and time-consuming manner, such as by sketches sent by fax, or by verbal communications over the telephone. Much of the detail or rationale of a design is lost in this manner. Similarly, the intermediate steps that led to a design, including ideas that were considered but not explored, are not communicated. Thus, a member of a team in a location remote from the source of the idea may engage in a repetition of the design process that led to a design proposal, since he did not have the benefit of observing the evolution of the idea. To be more effective, some design teams may schedule periodic face-to-face meetings. However, such meetings lead to loss of productivity from travel time and costs.
Various attempts have been made to facilitate the exchange of ideas through a simultaneous design effort. For example, “asynchronous” collaborative design has been attempted, wherein a design is resident on a central server connected to several team members (clients). While this is helpful, it suffers from a number of drawbacks. Since the model is resident on the central server, all design activity ceases in the event that the server is not functioning. Also, in such a system, only one team member can modify the model at a time. Each team member must wait while a member of the team modifies the design, and each team member must wait for the server to transmit the results to each team member. The design can progress in only one direction at a time. Furthermore, the volume of data that must be transmitted is large, which slows the process substantially.